Most printers such as ink-jet printers employ some type of sheet handling system for picking a sheet of print media such as paper from an input tray, advancing the picked sheet to a print area for printing operations, and delivering the sheet after printing to an exit location such as an output tray. The printers typically support printing on several media sizes, and may have more than one input tray or source. It therefore is useful in some applications to employ a media size detection system to detect the size of the paper or other print media that is being handled by the sheet handling device.
Some printers have used multiple reflective optical detectors located in the paper path to detect the size of the paper. This is expensive, particularly for more than two different paper sizes. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a paper size detection technique which did not rely on optical detectors.